Victorian Social Fiction

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The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction

Author : Rosemarie Bodenheimer
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501733443
Total Pages : 271 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction by : Rosemarie Bodenheimer

Download or read book The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction written by Rosemarie Bodenheimer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most telling expression of the politics of a novel, Rosemarie Bodenheimer asserts, lies not in its proclaimed social intent, its continuity with nonfictional discourse, or its truth to class experience, but in the models of social movement and transformation traced out in the thread of its narrative. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction explores the story patterns and other narrative conventions through which the industrial or social-problem novel gives fictional shape to questions that were experienced as new, unpredictable, and troubling in the Victorian age. Bodenheimer considers novels explicitly linked with the condition of England debates that preoccupied public-minded Victorians, narratives that confront such topics as the factory system, industrial and rural poverty, working-class politics, and the plight of women. Grouping well-known novels with less frequently read works according to shared narrative patterns, Bodenheimer delineates lines of influence, argument, and development within the subgenre of social fiction. Among the works she discusses are Charlotte Bronte's Shirley, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, two novels by Frances Trollope, Geraldine Jewsbury's Marian Withers, George Eliot's Felix Holt the Radical, Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, and Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil.

Feeling for the Poor

Author : Carolyn Betensky
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780813930619
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (36 download)

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Book Synopsis Feeling for the Poor by : Carolyn Betensky

Download or read book Feeling for the Poor written by Carolyn Betensky and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if the political work of Victorian social-problem novels was precisely to make the reader feel as if reading them--in and of itself--mattered? Surveying novels by Charles Dickens, Frances Trollope, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Henry James, Carolyn Betensky tracks the promotion of bourgeois feeling as a response to the suffering of the poor and working classes. Victorian social-problem novels, she argues, volunteered the experience of their own reading as a viable response to conflicts that seemed daunting or irreconcilable. Encoded at multiple levels within the novels themselves, reading became something to do about the pain of others. Beyond representations of conscious or unconscious wishes to control, conquer, or discipline the industrial poor, social-problem novels offered their middle-class readers the opportunity to experience themselves in the position of both benefactor and beneficiary. Betensky argues that these narratives were not only about middle-class fear of or sympathy for the working classes. They gave voice, just as importantly, to a middle-class desire for and even envy of the experience of the dominated classes. In their representations of poor and working-class characters, social-problem novels offered middle-class subjects an expanded range of emotional experience that included a claim to sympathy on their own behalf.

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State

Author : Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 0801881544
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Literature and the Victorian State by : Lauren M. E. Goodlad

Download or read book Victorian Literature and the Victorian State written by Lauren M. E. Goodlad and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2004-12-07 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies of Victorian governance have been profoundly influenced by Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault's groundbreaking genealogy of modern power. Yet, according to Lauren Goodlad, Foucault's analysis is better suited to the history of the Continent than to nineteenth-century Britain, with its decentralized, voluntarist institutional culture and passionate disdain for state interference. Focusing on a wide range of Victorian writing—from literary figures such as Charles Dickens, George Gissing, Harriet Martineau, J. S. Mill, Anthony Trollope, and H. G. Wells to prominent social reformers such as Edwin Chadwick, Thomas Chalmers, Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, and Beatrice Webb—Goodlad shows that Foucault's later essays on liberalism and "governmentality" provide better critical tools for understanding the nineteenth-century British state. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State delves into contemporary debates over sanitary, education, and civil service reform, the Poor Laws, and the century-long attempt to substitute organized charity for state services. Goodlad's readings elucidate the distinctive quandary of Victorian Britain and, indeed, any modern society conceived in liberal terms: the elusive quest for a "pastoral" agency that is rational, all-embracing, and effective but also anti-bureaucratic, personalized, and liberatory. In this study, impressively grounded in literary criticism, social history, and political theory, Goodlad offers a timely post-Foucauldian account of Victorian governance that speaks to the resurgent neoliberalism of our own day.

The Social Life of Fluids

Author : Jules David Law
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 080146238X
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Social Life of Fluids by : Jules David Law

Download or read book The Social Life of Fluids written by Jules David Law and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Victorians were obsessed with fluids—with their scarcity and with their omnipresence. By the mid-nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of citizens regularly petitioned the government to provide running water and adequate sewerage, while scientists and journalists fretted over the circulation of bodily fluids. In The Social Life of Fluids Jules Law traces the fantasies of power and anxieties of identity precipitated by these developments as they found their way into the plotting and rhetoric of the Victorian novel. Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids—blood, breast milk, and water—in six Victorian novels (by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore, and Bram Stoker), Law traces the growing anxiety about fluids in Victorian culture from the beginning of the sanitarian movement in the 1830s through the 1890s. Fluids, he finds, came to be regarded as the most alienable aspect of an otherwise inalienable human body, and, paradoxically, as the least rational element of an increasingly rationalized environment. Drawing on literary and feminist theory, social history, and the history of science and medicine, Law shows how fluids came to be represented as prosthetic extensions of identity, exposing them to contested claims of kinship and community and linking them inextricably to public spaces and public debates.

The Victorian Social-Problem Novel

Author : Josephine M. Guy
Publisher : Red Globe Press
ISBN 13 : 0333628446
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (336 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Social-Problem Novel by : Josephine M. Guy

Download or read book The Victorian Social-Problem Novel written by Josephine M. Guy and published by Red Globe Press. This book was released on 1996-09-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes various accounts of the Victorian social-problem novel, examining their strengths and limitations in the light of the historiographical assumptions which underlie them. An alternative historical account is offered, which focuses on the novels' intellectual milieu - specifically on mid-Victorian concepts of 'the social' and of what was understood by the term 'social problem'. In detailed readings of individual works, the book argues that an appreciation of these concepts permits new ways of understanding the contradictions identified in these works together with their apparently 'conservative' politics.

The Victorian Novelist

Author : Kate Flint
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317234715
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis The Victorian Novelist by : Kate Flint

Download or read book The Victorian Novelist written by Kate Flint and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-12 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1987. Many Victorian novels that considered social problems made extensive use of contemporary source material for their descriptions. This book aims to provide a greater acquaintance with this non-literary material — illustrating and exemplifying issues that the authors treated imaginatively. The material is divided into parts dealing with: the industrial north of England, London and the agricultural poor. Extracts from writings that bear directly on the fiction of writers like Dickens and Gaskell are featured, as are Government Blue Books and newspaper reports and articles. This volume also contains articles by Dickens and others, from his magazine, Household Words.

Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction

Author : Leila Silvana May
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780367346423
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (464 download)

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Book Synopsis Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction by : Leila Silvana May

Download or read book Secrecy and Disclosure in Victorian Fiction written by Leila Silvana May and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why were the Victorians more fascinated with secrecy than people of other periods? What is the function of secrets in Victorian fiction and in the society depicted, how does it differ from that of other periods, and how did readers of Victorian fiction respond to the secrecy they encountered? These are some of the questions Leila May poses in her study of the dynamics of secrecy and disclosure in fiction from Queen Victoria's coronation to the century's end. May argues that the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Arthur Conan Doyle reflect a distinctly Victorian obsession with the veiling and unveiling of information. She argues that there are two opposing vectors in Victorian culture concerning secrecy and subjectivity, one presupposing a form of radical Cartesian selfhood always remaining a secret to other selves and another showing that nothing can be hidden from the trained eye. (May calls the relation between these clashing tendencies the "dialectics" of secrecy and disclosure.) May's theories of secrecy and disclosure are informed by the work of twentieth-century social scientists. She emphasizes Georg Simmel's thesis that sociality and subjectivity are impossible without secrecy and Erving Goffman's claim that sociality can be understood in terms of performativity, "the presentation of the self in everyday life," and his revelation that performance always involves disguise, hence secrecy. May's study offers convincing evidence that secrecy and duplicity, in contrast to the Victorian period's emphasis on honesty and earnestness, emerged in response to the social pressures of class, gender, monarchy, and empire, and were key factors in producing both the subjectivity and the sociality that we now recognize as Victorian.

Victorian Contagion

Author : Chung-jen Chen
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000691543
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Contagion by : Chung-jen Chen

Download or read book Victorian Contagion written by Chung-jen Chen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Contagion: Risk and Social Control in the Victorian Literary Imagination examines the literary and cultural production of contagion in the Victorian era and the way that production participated in a moral economy of surveillance and control. In this book, I attempt to make sense of how the discursive practice of contagion governed the interactions and correlations between medical science, literary creation, and cultural imagination. Victorians dealt with the menace of contagion by theorizing a working motto in claiming the goodness and godliness in cleanliness which was theorized, realized, and radicalized both through practice and imagination. The Victorian discourse around cleanliness and contagion, including all its treatments and preventions, developed into a culture of medicalization, a perception of surveillance, a politics of health, an economy of morality, and a way of thinking. This book is an attempt to understands the literary and cultural elements which contributed to fear and anticipation of contagion, and to explain why and how these elements still matter to us today.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

Author : Leah Price
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691159548
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (911 download)

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Book Synopsis How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain by : Leah Price

Download or read book How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-27 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel

Author : Laura C. Berry
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813934570
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (345 download)

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Book Synopsis The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel by : Laura C. Berry

Download or read book The Child, the State and the Victorian Novel written by Laura C. Berry and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel traces the the story of victimized childhood to its origins in nineteenth-century Britain. Almost as soon as "childhood" became a distinct category, Laura C. Berry contends, stories of children in danger were circulated as part of larger debates about child welfare and the role of the family in society. Berry examines the nineteenth-century fascination with victimized children to show how novels and reform writings reorganize ideas of self and society as narratives of childhood distress. Focusing on classic childhood stories such as Oliver Twist and novels that are not conventionally associated with particular social problems, such as Dickens's Dombey and Son, the Brontë sisters' Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and George Eliot's Adam Bede, Berry shows the ways in which fiction that purports to deal with private life, particularly the domain of the family, nevertheless intervenes in public and social debates. At the same time she examines medical, legal, charitable, and social-relief writings to show how these documents provide crucial sources in the development of social welfare and modern representations of the family.

Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse

Author : Gina M. Dorré
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1351875892
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (518 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse by : Gina M. Dorré

Download or read book Victorian Fiction and the Cult of the Horse written by Gina M. Dorré and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The horse was essential to the workings of Victorian society, and its representations, which are vast, ranging, and often contradictory, comprise a vibrant cult of the horse. Examining the representational, emblematic, and rhetorical uses of horses in a diversity of nineteenth-century texts, Gina M. Dorré shows how discourses about horses reveal and negotiate anxieties related to industrialism and technology, constructions of gender and sexuality, ruptures in the social fabric caused by class conflict and mobility, and changes occasioned by national "progress" and imperial expansion. She argues that as a cultural object, the horse functions as a repository of desire and despair in a society rocked by astonishing social, economic, and technological shifts. While representations of horses abound in Victorian fiction, Gina M. Dorré's study focuses on those novels by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Sewell, and George Moore that engage with the most impassioned controversies concerning horses and horse-care, such as the introduction of the steam engine, popular new methods of horse-taming, debates over the tight-reining of horses, and the moral furor surrounding gambling at the race track. Her book establishes the centrality of the horse as a Victorian cultural icon and explores how through it, dominant ideologies of gender and class are created, promoted, and disrupted.

The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature

Author : Jennifer Hedgecock
Publisher : Cambria Press
ISBN 13 : 1604975180
Total Pages : 252 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature by : Jennifer Hedgecock

Download or read book The Femme Fatale in Victorian Literature written by Jennifer Hedgecock and published by Cambria Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "examines the changing social and economic status of women from the 1860s through the 1880s, and rejects the stereotypical mid-Victorian femme fatale portrayed by conservative ideologues critiquing popular fiction by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Honore de Balzac, and William Makepeace Thackeray. In these book reviews, the female protagonist is simply minimized to a dangerous woman. Refuting this one-dimensional characterization, this book argues that the femme fatale comes to represent the real-life struggles of the middle-class Victorian woman who overcomes major adversities such as poverty, abusive husbands, abandonment, single parenthood, limited job opportunities, the criminal underworld, and Victorian society's harsh invective against her." --publisher description.

An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction

Author : Gregory Vargo
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107197856
Total Pages : 299 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction by : Gregory Vargo

Download or read book An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction written by Gregory Vargo and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the journalism and fiction appearing in the early Victorian working-class periodical press and its influence on mainstream literature.

Victorian Structures

Author : Jody Griffith
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143847833X
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Victorian Structures by : Jody Griffith

Download or read book Victorian Structures written by Jody Griffith and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2020-03-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Victorian novels often feature lengthy descriptions of the buildings where characters live, work, and pray, we may not always notice the stories these buildings tell. But when we do pay attention, we find these buildings offer more than evocative background settings. Victorian Structures uses the architectural writings of Victorian critic John Ruskin as a framework for examining the interaction of physical, social, and narrative structures in Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Adam Bede by George Eliot, and The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. By closely reading their descriptions of architectural structure, this book reconsiders structure itself—both the social structures the novels reflect, and the narrative structures they employ. Weaving together analysis of these three kinds of structure offers an interpretation of Victorian realism that is far more socially and formally unstable than critics have tended to assume. It illustrates how these novels radically critique the limitations, dysfunctions, and deceptions of structure, while also imagining alternative possibilities. This unique interdisciplinary approach emphasizes structure-in-time: while current conversations about structure focus on its static and fixed properties, this book understands it as various forces in tension, producing meanings that are always in flux. Victorian Structures focuses not only on the way structures shape our perceptions and experiences, but also, more importantly, on the processes through which those structures come to be constructed in the first place, and how they change over time.

Scenes of Sympathy

Author : Audrey Jaffe
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 150171998X
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (17 download)

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Book Synopsis Scenes of Sympathy by : Audrey Jaffe

Download or read book Scenes of Sympathy written by Audrey Jaffe and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe argues that representations of sympathy in Victorian fiction both reveal and unsettle Victorian ideologies of identity. Situating these representations within the context of Victorian visual culture, and offering new readings of key works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Wood, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Jaffe shows how mid-Victorian spectacles of social difference construct the middle-class self, and how late-Victorian narratives of feeling pave the way for the sympathetic affinities of contemporary identity politics. Perceptive and elegantly written, Scenes of Sympathy is the first detailed examination of the place of sympathy in Victorian fiction and ideology. It will redirect the current critical conversation about sympathy and refocus discussions of late-Victorian fictions of identity.

The Working-Classes in Victorian Fiction

Author : Peter Keating
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317232267
Total Pages : 339 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (172 download)

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Book Synopsis The Working-Classes in Victorian Fiction by : Peter Keating

Download or read book The Working-Classes in Victorian Fiction written by Peter Keating and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1971. The book examines the presentation of the urban and industrial working classes in Victorian fiction. It considers the different types of working men and women who appear in fiction, the environments they are shown to inhabit, and the use of phonetics to indicate the sound of working class voices. Evidence is drawn from a wide range of major and minor fiction, and new light is cast on Dickens, Mrs Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, George Gissing, Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Morrison. This book would be of interest to students of literature, sociology and history.

The Most Dreadful Visitation

Author : Valerie Pedlar
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
ISBN 13 : 0853238391
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (532 download)

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Book Synopsis The Most Dreadful Visitation by : Valerie Pedlar

Download or read book The Most Dreadful Visitation written by Valerie Pedlar and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian literature is rife with scenes of madness, with mental disorder functioning as everything from a simple plot device to a commentary on the foundations of Victorian society. But while madness in Victorian fiction has been much studied, most scholarship has focused on the portrayal of madness in women; male mental disorder in the period has suffered comparative neglect. Valerie Pedlar corrects this imbalance in The 'Most Dreadful Visitation.' This extraordinary study explores a wide range of Victorian writings to consider the relationship between the portrayal of mental illness in literary works and the portrayal of similar disorders in the writings of doctors and psychologists. Pedlar presents in-depth studies of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Tennyson's Maud, Wilkie Collins's Basil, and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right, considering each work in the context of Victorian understandings--and fears--of mental degeneracy.An Open Access edition of this work is available on the OAPEN Library.